Gilded Lily by Isabel Vincent Read Free Book Online Page A

visit to Montevideo in March 1962, Lily was already plotting how she would tell Mario that their marriage was over. She’d had enough of their sleepy existence in Montevideo. She wanted to return to Rio, to recapture at least part of what now seemed such a glamorous life as a promising debutante in her white organdy dress. In her late twenties, her youth was slipping away, and life with Mario was not the fairy tale she had envisioned it to be. Although he appeared to be a good father, he was distant with the children, overwhelmed by his own concerns with the Cohen family company. Often when Lily and the children prepared for family vacations in Punta del Este, Mario was absent for weeks at a time, tending to business in Montevideo and Argentina.
    Although she yearned to return to her old life in Rio, Lily wanted to do so in style. In the early 1960s, it simply wouldn’t do for a respectable mother of three young children to leave her husband and set off for another country, even if she could move quite easily into her parents’ sprawling apartment in Copacabana. No, Lily would have to wait for another way out of her marriage to Mario Cohen.
    Lily’s escape route may have been made patently clear to her when she met Alfredo Monteverde, the handsome owner of Ponto Frio,Brazil’s most successful chain of appliance stores. Alfredo was tall and worldly with a devastating sense of humor. He was also extremely wealthy. Friends say that it was on one of those long family vacations in Punta del Este that the married woman and mother of three began to flirt with the Rio millionaire after the two had been introduced by their mutual friend Samy Cohn.
    After his second failed marriage, to a former Air France stewardess named Scarlett, Alfredo was ready for another relationship. He fell in love easily with Lily. She was beautiful and refined, and she would have none of Scarlett’s difficulties of adaptation to life in Rio de Janeiro. Lily must have seemed to him practically a native.
    â€œShe was even more charming as a young mother,” recalled Veiga, who saw Lily again at Alfredo’s office for the first time since she was a fifteen-year-old sneaking into his courtyard to kiss Izidor.
    Veiga, Wolf’s former neighbor and valuable intermediary, also did business with Alfredo, who was planning to add car imports to his burgeoning appliance business. Veiga recalls finding out about the relationship between Alfredo and Lily during a business meeting at the Ponto Frio corporate offices in 1964. “I was completely stunned,” recalled Veiga. “I saw Lily followed by three small children at Fred’s office, and it was very clear to me that she and Fred were very much a couple. I knew from the way they were behaving with each other that they must be married or on their way to being married.”
    Alfredo married Lily in a civil ceremony at the Office of the City Clerk in lower Manhattan on February 26, 1965. According to friends and family, Mario was not happy about the divorce, and desperately tried to hold onto his young wife. Alfredo was forty and Lily had just celebrated her thirtieth birthday the previous December.
    The following year, on October 16, 1966, they married again at a registry office in downtown Rio de Janeiro, attended by Lily’s brother Daniel and her best friend in Rio at the time, Carmen Sirotsky. Carmen’s husband Sani, an advertising executive in Rio, had worked on many of Ponto Frio’s advertising campaigns and knew Alfredo well.
    The Monteverde-Watkins marriage (on registry documents, she didn’t acknowledge that she had once been Mrs. Cohen) was also registered in Brazil’s new capital, Brasília, on April 5, 1967.
    It is not clear why they felt the need to register their marriage in so many different places. As with his previous marriages, Alfredo made a point of registering the union in New York. Perhaps he felt that legal unions carried more